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A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

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I love Virginia Woolf.  Whenever I’m not reading her, I have slight doubts in my mind – is she really as brilliant as I remember?  Does a little bit of me just love Woolf because I think I ought to love Woolf?  And then I re-read one of her books, and realise that she is as brilliant as I remember – I find it very hard to believe that there is a better writer in the twentieth century.  Suggestions on a postcard.

Even those who wrinkle their noses at her fiction (listen up, Colin) tend to admire her non-fiction.  For my thesis I had the pleasure of re-reading A Room of One’s Own (1929), bringing the total to three reads I believe, and it has confirmed my adoration of the book.  Many of us are probably familiar with its central tenet – that, in order to write, a woman must have a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year – but it is surprisingly how slim a section of the work this mantra occupies.  You might (like me) also recall Woolf recounting her experiences at an Oxbridge college, forbidden from using the library and chastised for walking on the grass.  And Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s hypothetical sister with equal talent but no chance of fame.  But these are only small elements within a much wider exploration of women through history, through literature, and in contemporary society.  Like most of Woolf’s writing, she meanders (in the best possible way) from topic to topic, from thought leading to thought, so that one is at the end, far from where one started, without ever seeing the joins.  The whole essay (originally delivered as two talks, and edited into its current form) winds beautifully through so many thoughtful and striking ideas that to explore them all would be simply to type out the whole essay.

And how tempting that is!  I want to quote it all, to demonstrate the beauty and astuteness (in more or less equal measures) that Woolf fits into A Room of One’s Own.  Woolf is so intoxicatingly good a writer that it feels almost an affront to write about her.  So I shall mostly quote.

Having been turned away from one library, Woolf (or, rather, the essayist – she is probably being playful with truth and personalities at times) takes herself to another, trying to discover what has been written about women by the scholars, theorists, and novelists.  That dry, sardonic, slightly self-deprecating wit that Woolf uses so often in her essays comes to the fore when reading a psychological tome (while doodling the author’s face):
It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.  My heart had leapt.  My cheeks had burnt.  I had flushed with anger.  There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that.  One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man – I looked at the student next me – who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight.  One has certain foolish vanities.  It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing cart-wheels and circles over the angry professor’s face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet – anyhow, an apparition without human semblance or significance.Her conclusions, after journeying through much that has been written in literature, history, and psychology, says (of course) more about the ways in which women have been treated in these fields than it does about women themselves:
A very queer, composite being thus emerges.  Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.  She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.  She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.  Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.As I say, there is far too much in A Room of One’s Own to be able to do it all justice.  As an essay, it deserves and requires slow, careful reading and re-reading.  Woolf’s writing is too rich for skimming.  I can only imagine how frustrating (as well as wonderful) it must have been to hear the lectures – to hear such genius (yes, I will use the word) and not be able to jot it all down for later!  How fortunate are we, to have the book readily available.  But amongst the many glorious elements of Woolf’s essay, I perhaps loved most her journeys through women’s writing over time:
For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Vilette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour’s discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing.  Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.  For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.  Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter – the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek.  All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is,most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.  It is she – shady and amorous as she was – who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.So much of what A Room of One’s Own addresses are battles that have been now won.  Woolf is not arguing about the numbers of female CEOs (why this is ever held up as a statistic, I can’t imagine – how dreadful it must be to be a CEO!) she is arguing for women’s education and entitlement to positions of intellectual credibility.  But one point did stand out to me, a battle which is still unwon:
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war.  This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.  A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.How many of us have heard this!  There are still (but how?) intelligent people who disregard, say, Jane Austen because she does not feature the Napoleonic Wars.  And many of our beloved middlebrow novelists fall victim to the same absurd views about what do and do not constitute viable literary topics.  This isn’t as important as the battle for women to have university education (although sooner or later nobody, male or female, will be able to afford this, at the rate we’re going) but it is a battle nonetheless.

However, I don’t think one needs to be especially interested in feminist non-fiction to value A Room of One’s Own.  I suppose, come to think of it, I am not especially interested in feminist non-fiction (however much I support the cause) because I’ve just realised that I haven’t really read much else in this field.  What makes A Room of One’s Own so sublime in my eyes is not Woolf’s arguments and ideas, but her writing.  It flows so exquisitely; Woolf is so amusing and sharp, laughing at every turn, realising that aggression is far from the only way to make a point.  It is a book to read and re-read and re-read again – and a happy reminder that Woolf is not a writer for the elite or pretentious, but simply for those who admire ability, don’t abhor thinking, and enjoy having a smile at the same time.  If you’ve not read it – oh, do, do, do!

The Other Garden – Francis Wyndham

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I had a lovely day at Chatsworth, even though all didn’t go entirely to plan.  I’ll fill you in on all that soon!  (WHAT a cliffhanger!)  For today, let’s fill up one of those surprisingly-less-tricky-than-expected 1980s slots in A Century of Books.

I picked up The Other Garden (1987) by Francis Wyndham because I thought I’d heard of the author (and because it was short, cheap, and sounded interesting) but I must have been thinking of someone else, since this seems to have been Wyndham’s only novel, although he also wrote (writes?) short stories.  It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and various luminaries are printed on the cover saying that it ‘Comes as close to perfection as you’ll get in an imperfect world’ (Hilary Bailey); ‘Perfectly judged… wry, exact, poised’ (Harold Pinter); ‘A completely faultless piece of writing’ (Susan Hill).  Well… it left me a little nonplussed.  Yes, this is going to be one of those rather uninspiring reviews where I am forced to say “It’s fine, but that’s about it.”

I was, though, rather struck by the opening:

“How soon will lunch be ready?” my father would ask.  Assuming that hunger had made him impatient, my mother would answer with eager apology, “Oh, any minute now – it must be nearly one.”  But she had misinterpreted him.  He had really wanted to know if he still had time for a further look at the other garden before sitting down to the meal.  In dismay, she would watch him put on an old grey trilby hat, choose a stick, pass purposefully through the front entrance, then walk serenely down the short drive and vanish into the open road.  Almost immediately opposite, a painted white wooden door in a red brick wall admitted him to this beloved extension of his property, subtly but certainly separate from the house and its bland surrounding lawns.  Once in the other garden he was safely out of earshot – but a few minutes later I would be sent in search of him with a summons to return, the serving of our good having been innocently hastened by his ambiguous question when what he had hoped for was delay.
This opening paragraph, and the title of the novel (novella?  It’s super short) led me to think that The Other Garden might, indeed, be about this other garden.  Well, perhaps it was a metaphor for something (give me a moment) because it only turned up at the beginning and the end.  In between, it focuses mainly on the Demarest family, acquaintances of the narrator’s family, albeit rather more well-to-do.  Kay and Sandy are the children, Sybil and Charlie are the Demarest parents.  The narrator (who may or may not be named) is focused chiefly on Kay, a young woman who is rather captivating and wilful.

And… I don’t think I can remember much else.  There is a sweet dog at one point.  And Denis (a rather eccentric schoolfriend of the narrator) is shipped off to Switzerland for TB treatment.  He’s odd.  What else?  Oh dear, oh dear.  I only read it recently, and all the details have faded.  It was that sort of book.  If I weren’t recording all my books for A Century of Books, I’d have quietly slipped this back on the shelf, and never mentioned it…  But I did jot down one quotation which I liked.  Sybil generally isn’t a very sympathetic character, but I think a lot of us would raise a glass to this:

“I do believe,” Sybil continued, “that when the history books come to be written it will emerge that the great unsung heroine of these times we’re living through will be none other than that much maligned creature, the British Housewife!  I’m thinking, in fact, of writing a letter to the Daily Telegraph to propose that some promising young sculptor – or perhaps a sculptress would be a better choice – should be officially commissioned to design a statue in her honour, and that the result should be prominently erected in some public place.  I don’t know about you, but I for one am getting sick and tired of looking at monuments portraying middle-aged men on horseback!”
The details of The Other Garden escape me, but I do remember the effect it had upon me.  It’s no secret that I love short books, and I really admire authors who can use 100-200 pages effectively.  But a novella demands its own structure.  The ‘rules’ for that aren’t obvious – indeed, they don’t exist, do they? – but I don’t think a novella should be simply a truncated novel.  It felt like Wyndham’s training at the short story had made him unable to structure a whole novel – I don’t know, it just felt incomplete.  Not terminated too early, but as though it were the skeleton of a different, longer novel.  Somehow not satisfying. Hmm.  My post started fairly vaguely, and it’ll end inconclusively.  It’s probably a warning sign that, a week or two after I finished The Other Garden, I don’t really remember anything about it.  But… don’t forget that Hilary Bailey thinks it ‘comes as close to perfection as you’ll get in an imperfect world.’  So what do I know?

 

Chatsworth!

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I’m off to Chatsworth for the day – I’ll report back later!

And Janey, if you’re still interested in Babbit, email me at simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk :)

Oh, whilst I’m giving brief notices – for those interested, I decided to change my Twitter handle from simonsiab (since people seemed confused over the ‘siab’ bit) to stuck_inabook – so I’m at Twitter.com/stuck_inabook.  One day I’ll understand Twitter…

What else have I been up to?  I watched an episode of As Time Goes By tonight which I hadn’t seen for ages, and chuckled away (the last episode in series 4, since you ask – a very enjoyable mockery of film sets.)

Have a lovely Tuesday, everyone!

Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga

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A friend lent me Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) an embarrassingly long time ago (we’re talking years) and a combination of the appalling cover and the vague, uninviting title meant that I put it off for ages, and then forgot about it.  I finally remembered that I still had it a couple of weeks ago, flicked it open with some trepidation… and was almost immediately hooked.  What is it they say about judging books by their covers – do it or don’t do it?  I forget.

The striking opening line is ‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’  The ‘I’ in question is Tambudzai, who lives with her family in 1960s what-was-then Rhodesia.  They’re in a poor rural community, the poorest members of a large family – they can only afford to send one child to school, and it is Tambudzai’s brother Nhamo who gets this honour.  Tambudzai is desperate to attend school, even growing and selling her own maize to get the fees, but Nhamo tries to assert his masculine superiority at every turn, making Tambudzai miserable.  The reader doesn’t mourn much when Nhamo dies – and nor, it seems, does Tambudzai.  His death takes place in ‘the mission’, where Tambudzai’s rich uncle lives with his wife, son, and daughter Nyasha – and it is here where Tambudzai is herself later taken:

Thus began the period of my reincarnation.  I liked to think of my transfer to the mission as my reincarnation. With the egotistical faith of fourteen short years, during which my life had progressed very much according to plan, I expected this era to be significantly profound and broadening in terms of adding wisdom to my nature, clarity to my vision, glamour to my person.  In short, I expected my sojourn to fulfil all my fourteen-year-old fantasies, and on the whole I was not disappointed.  Freed from the constraints of the necessary and the squalid that defined and delimited our activity at home, I invested a lot of robust energy in approximating to my idea of a young woman of the world.  I was clean now, not only on special occasions but every day of the week.  
Nyasha is about the same age as Tambudzai, but had spent some time in England and adjusted to 1960s English culture, before having to re-adjust back to 1960s Rhodesian expectations.  One of the most interesting aspects of the Nervous Conditions is the contrast (and friendship) between these cousins.  Nyasha (although only fourteen) is considered loose and immoral for wearing short skirts and talking to boys; Tambudzai is keen to adhere to her uncle’s instructions, but is developing her own conscience and personality at the same time.  There is another storyline relating to Nyasha’s well-being which appears rather too suddenly at the end, and doesn’t really work – indeed, the whole ending is surprisingly rushed – but before that, this contrast of characters is really fascinating.  Alongside, there is an equally well-drawn juxtaposition of Tambudzai’s old life and her new life.  Although her parents want the best future for her, they are also clearly a little confused and jealous when she visits with a developing outlook on life.  It’s done very subtly, for the most part, and you can tell that the novel is semi-autobiographical.

Indeed, this is probably one of the reasons I enjoyed Nervous Conditions so much.  If you’ve been reading SiaB for a while, you probably know that I don’t like books set in countries which the author isn’t from, or doesn’t know well.  So if a British author wrote a novel set in Zimbabwe, but had never been nearer than Portugal, or had only been for a fortnight on a package holiday, then I wouldn’t be interested.  Since Dangarembga’s childhood was in fact in some respects like Nyasha’s (it seems), I’m very willing to read her views of her country and people.  Here’s a good example of why:

We waved and shouted and danced.  Then came Babamukuru, his car large and impressive, all sparkling metal and polished dark green.  It was too much for me.  I could have clambered on to the bonnet but, with Shupi in my arms, had to be content with a song: “Mauya, mauya.  Mauya, mauya.  Mauya, Babamukuru!”  Netsai picked up the melody.  Our vocal cords vibrating through wide arcs, we made an unbelievable racket.  Singing and dancing we ushered Babamukuru on to the homestead, hardly noticing Babamunini Thomas, who brought up the rear, not noticing Mainini Patience, who was with him, at all.
Had this been written by an author who had never lived in Africa, it could never have been as natural.  The greeting – so normal and expected of Tambudzai – would have become some sort of spectacle, where the dancing and singing would have been relayed as a piece of research.  I much prefer the sort of novel Nervous Conditions is, where the reader – wherever they live – is immersed in the non-artificial perspective of a local.

Primarily, of course, I valued Nervous Conditions for Dangarembga’s writing.  It is lilting and beautiful, but not overly stylised.  It flows naturally, and gives Tambudzai’s voice perfectly.  My only reservation with the novel, aside from the aforementioned rushed ending, was that it occasionally lost the subtlety which mostly made it special.  I’m all for a feminist message, but sometimes Dangarembga didn’t trust to the show-don’t-tell method (and she should have trusted it, because she excels at it for the most part.  Excerpts like this just felt as though they’d been included for cutting and pasting into high school essays:

[…]Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize.  The victimisation, I saw, was universal.  It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition.  It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on.  Men took it everywhere with them.
Not to mention how reductive that it.  Never mind.  Nervous Conditions is a novel, not a treatise, and for the most part Dangarembga achieves this wonderfully.  Not for nothing did it win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989.  It’s always a treat when I enjoy a book much more than I thought I would, and I can only apologise to my friend that it took me so long to get around to reading this one.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Well, it’s wet and miserable here – but it has been beautiful, as exemplified in this picture from the road trip I took on Thursday to Toot Baldon (because of its brilliant name).  Not a bad view for our picnic, eh?

1.) The blog post – go and read Hayley’s lovely, thought-provoking post about why so many of us love books as well as reading…

2.) The link – is this Youtube clip: a man being ‘interviewed’ by himself, from a video he made 20 years ago.  It’s very clever.

3.) The book – came from Bloomsbury the other day.  I should have read this back during the Jubilee weekend, but it’s still Jubilee Year, isn’t it?  I’m very excited about Coronation by Paul Gallico… I’ll let you know more soon!

 Have a great weekend!

Briefly… a pet peeve!

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I discovered recently that I have a pet peeve when it comes to novels.  I’ve been reading two really good books – Wise Children by Angela Carter and A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford – and they both are really, really good.  But both were a little marred for me… I’ve discovered that I really don’t like it when a novel starts with one scene in ‘present day’, and then skips back and starts again in the past, progressing forwards again to the present.

I haven’t quite worked out why.  I think I’m used to ‘flashbacks’ being a bit of something to skim through, and when the flashback takes up the entire novel, obviously things are different – and perhaps I find that disconcerting.  Somehow everything takes on that sepia tone of prolonged anticlimax…

Does anyone else feel like this?  I imagine not… but perhaps you have other pet peeves which feel irrational, yet affect your enjoyment a bit?

Sorry for such a brief post – I’ve spent the evening painting (final picture will be shown, if it is ever finished!) and now I’m going to sleep the sleep of just person in a turpentine-filled room.

The Love-Child by Edith Olivier

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I have blogged before about The Love-Child, one of my favourite books and in my ongoing list of 50 You Must Read, but I’ve never been very happy with my post on it.   Nor do I think the following wholly encapsulates how wonderful the novel is by any means, but… I thought it worth sharing.  I wrote it for Hesperus Press’s Uncover A Classic competition – but, sadly for me, a different book was chosen.  More on that soon, but I decided not to put my ‘500 word introduction’ to waste – and so, just in case you’ve yet to read this beautiful novel, here is the piece I wrote for the Hesperus competition…

photo source



Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (1927) was her first novel, and easily her best.  Although rediscovered as a ‘modern classic’ in 1981, it has not been reprinted since – perhaps because it resist categorisation – yet it deserves a far wider, rapturous audience.

The Love Child tells the story of Agatha Bodenham, a middle-aged childless spinster mourning the death of her mother as the novel opens.  She fondly recalls her childhood imaginary friend, Clarissa, and even copes with her loneliness by talking to Clarissa again.  This attachment grows until one afternoon, to Agatha’s surprise, Clarissa herself appears in the garden: ‘She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.  […] Physically, she looked shadowy and pathetic, but a spirit peeped out of her eyes, with something of roguishness, perhaps, but yet it was unmistakably there.’

Initially Clarissa is visible only to Agatha, but gradually others can see her also – and Agatha copes with both the joy of new-found companionship, and the embarrassment of explaining the sudden appearance of a child.  Eventually she decides she must pretend that Clarissa is her own daughter; her love child.  ‘She had saved her.  But at what a cost!  Her position, her name, her character – she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers’.

Olivier constructs a mother/daughter relationship which is more poignant, and more vulnerable than most.  Clarissa may disappear as suddenly as she appeared – especially when, as the years progress, a local man named David begins to fall in love with her.  Agatha’s possessiveness and uncertainty are drawn beautifully, demonstrating the pain suffered by one unused to love when her creation may be taken from her.  She is not cast as a villain, but simply a lonely woman battling for the solution to that loneliness.  Olivier herself had neither husband nor children when, in her fifties, she was inspired to start writing novels.  According to her autobiography, the idea for The Love Child came to her suddenly in the middle of the night, and was written ‘during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly.’  The novel certainly reads with the enchanting spontaneity this writing process suggests and, although often addressing sad topics, is far from a melancholy book.  This is primarily due to Clarissa herself.  She is a captivating character – naïve, almost elfin, yet fascinated by science and delighted by motorcars – she animates not only Agatha’s monotonous life, but enlivens the whole novel.

In a short book, which could easily be read in two or three hours, Olivier encompasses moving and involving themes in a warm, lively manner; it seems absurd that this beautiful novel should ever have fallen out of print.  A new generation of readers deserve to discover The Love Child.

The Island of the Colourblind – Oliver Sacks

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Every now and then I pick up something which couldn’t be further away from my dual comfort zones of 1920s-housewife and quirky-domestic, and end up being captivated.  So… now for something completely different!

I already knew that I loved Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and I have one or two of his books in various places – including The Island of the Colourblind (1997) (sorry, I can’t bring myself to give the American title, blame my English student sensibilities).  I can’t remember what it was that catapulted the book from shelf to hand – perhaps one too many novels with teacups and maids? – but it did indeed find its way there, and I whipped through it in a day or two.

The title and blurb both offer slightly false information – suggesting that there is an entire community of colourblind people on the ‘tiny Pacific atoll’ Pingelap.  It turns out that the incident of achromatopsia (symptoms are complete colourblindness – i.e. everything in greyscale – and a high sensitivity to light) is in fact one in 12 of the population.  It’s still wildly more than the rest of the world – where achromatopsia is found in one in 30,000.  Even though it is not the isolated, uniform community which Sacks initially hoped to find, he does highlight the emotional benefits of this high incidence:

There was an immediate understanding and sharing between them, a commonality of language and perception, which extended to Knut as well. […] When a Pingelapese baby starts to squint and turn away from the light, there is at least a cultural knowledge of his perceptual world, his special needs and strengths, even a mythology to explain it.  In this sense, then, Pingelap is an island of the colourblind.  No one born here with the maskun finds himself wholly isolated or misunderstood, which is the almost universal lot of people with congenital achromatopsia elsewhere in the world.

Amongst that number is the mentioned Knut – a Scandinavian scientist who both has and investigates the condition.  When Sacks offers Knut the chance to accompany him, Knut leaps at the chance – and his experience with the condition proves invaluable as a point of connection between the outsider Westerners and the inevitably intimate island society.  (Sacks is occasionally rather scathing about other Westerners who have visited, especially missionaries, but I suppose I couldn’t expect him to share my views on them – and, unlike his view of other visitors, he never considers his own work and provisions as a colonial activity.)  Knut also provides a sophisticated, intelligent and thorough angle of living with achromatopsia amongst millions who don’t.

Not thinking, I enthused about the wonderful blues of the sea – then stopped, embarrassed.  Knut, though he has no direct experience of colour, is very erudite on the subject.  He is intrigued by the range of words and images other people use about colour and was arrested by my use of the word “azure.”  (“Is it similar to cerulean?”)  He wondered whether “indigo” was, for me, a separate, seventh colour of the spectrum, neither blue nor violet, but itself, in between.  “Many people,” he added, “do not see indigo as a separate spectral colour, and others see light blue as distinct from blue.”  With no direct knowledge of colour, Knut has accumulated an immense mental catalogue, an archive, of vicarious colour knowledge about the world.

It reminded me somehow of Helen Keller’s accounts of living as a blind, dumb, death woman in a world which is largely none of these things – and the sensitivity with which she perceives how others might perceive her world.

There is no cure for achromatopsia, but it is a condition which becomes much more manageable with the simple expedient of dark glasses and strong magnifying glasses.  The next island Sacks visits, Guam, has a more debilitating illness shared by much of the population: Lytico-Bodig disease.  (I’m just realising how unlike my normal posts this is!)  It’s a neurological disease which manifests itself in symptoms like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.  Despite decades of research, nobody has worked out what caused this – but nobody born in the past few decades has shown any symptoms.  Sacks gets a bit too involved in the history of research into the disease for my understanding, but more personal accounts of people living with the condition cannot but be moving.

Sacks is certainly a learned neurologist, but his books are not textbooks in their style.  He has the gift of interweaving the scientist and the storyteller.  His narrative is moving and personal, rather than the impersonal facts and figures one might anticipate from a scientific study.  Perhaps it is most poignant when Sacks realises the limitations of his work:

To calm her, the family started to sing an old folk song, and the old lady, so demented, so fragmented, most of the time, joined in, singing fluently along with the others.  She seemed to get all the words, all the feeling, of the song, and to be composed, restored to herself, as long as she sang.  John and I slipped out quietly while they were singing, suddenly feeling, at this point, that neurology was irrelevant.

I wouldn’t ever browse the science sections of bookshops, and I don’t remember how I first stumbled across The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, but I’m very glad I did.  The Island of the Colourblind (a play on Wells’ The Island of the Blind, which I should mention before this post ends) isn’t as captivating as that book, but it is a rather different kettle of fish.  Instead of many psychological disorders and fascinating patients, Sacks explores two communities – more slowly, more deeply, and even more sympathetically.  There was a danger in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat that it could feel a bit like giving a penny to see a freakshow (although I’m sure that’s not what Sacks intended.)  The Island of the Colourblind invites the reader onto two islands, to become, however briefly, a concerned member of two very different communities – not watching from the outside, but sympathising from the inside.  The fascinating statistical aberrations are still there, as are some as-yet unexplained mysteries, but this is primarily a very human study – and a narrative which treads the path between science and storytelling, almost always with impressive success.

Half a Century of Books

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I had a lovely break in Somerset, and was surprised by how well my little sale went – I’ll head off to the post office tomorrow, laden with parcels.  I’ll see how many books I cull later in the year, and might well bring it back again.

But onto today’s post… We are now in the second half of the year, and I am continuing my quarterly look at how A Century of Books is going. Here was the first quarter’s, where I was on exactly 25 that qualified.  My sidebar at the moment announces that I’ve done 44 of my 100, but there are a further six which I’ve yet to review, so… once more, I am precisely on target!  50 books read for A Century of Books; 50 to go.  (I have actually read nearer 70 books this year, but the others have been pre- or post- 20th century, or overlapped on my list.)

Links to all the reviewed books are here.  And here’s how I’m doing, by decade…

1900s: 3
1910s: 1
1920s: 8
1930s: 6
1940s: 8
1950s: 5
1960s: 3
1970s: 5
1980s: 6
1990s: 5

Still a noticeable slump at the beginning of the century, but surprisingly high numbers at the end of it…

If you’re reading along with A Century of Books, or any similar project – how is yours going?